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Forge Valley near Scarborough has quite a heavy name, hammering out a reminder of medieval charcoal making and iron working. Ten millennia before that the valley was gouged out violently by meltwater. It’s still deep, steep and narrow, and ‘oversized’ for its river.

The English Nature info boards attest to the rich and rare wildlife in this National Nature Reserve, but their maps are stingy on walk route information. So we asked a bird benefactor at the Bird Watchers’ carpark where the nearest bridge was. He directed us to the small but perfectly hygienic Old Man’s Mouth carpark where the wavy tongue ferns glistened, pendulous sedges provide an all-year green beard and a fuzz of mosses coat cosy insect hideaways and shelter boils of scarlet fungi.

The wooden footbridge is over the River Derwent, here a steady clear uniform flow a few of yards wide, a foot or so deep. Beside it run duckboards, slithery, though in the process of non-slip resurfacing. Boardwalk for a duckwalk, if not Chuck Berry style, then a slow waddle past the riches for half a mile.

The otters are rarely seen but one’s advised to look out for their ‘spraints (droppings)’ or listen for the ‘distinctive plop’. There was a feel of life, the ground did not show the hammer of the winter.

The duckboards stop and the valley changes shape, widening, acquiring a slopping terrace of pasture. Three herons lifted from the grass and exercised their five or six foot wingspans on a sweep of the misty air to land and watch, grey sentinels in the tops of the highest skyline conifers. The Derwent and environs hold heron food, including brown trout, grayling and crayfish.

After a couple of miles it was time to turn around and climb the valleyside by way of a sunken path, quite a deepened gully, and then a track at the tree line. Here we stopped for a sandwich, the mist, well rain, blurred the view towards Hackness. Half a dozen long tailed tits came close and flitted around us in a hazel tree, they weren’t after the catkins.

Yes, tracks now at higher altitudes, better draining limestone and grit underneath a layer of autumn sown crops. Three deer saw us from half a mile away, watched intently and then bobbed into the woods as we closed.

That just left the way down the very steep side of Forge Valley. Luckily there is a most efficient and comfortable zigzag descent that is also on the 1854 map.